THIS ARTICLE MAY BE TRIGGERING. FREQUENT DISCUSSION OF RAPE/SEXUAL ASSAULT.

[Ahem, this is technically a response to a Facebook post on a friend’s feed. You’re coming in at the middle. Apologies.]

First, let me say I 100000% agree on the power/wealth aspect of our justice system – this is how I understand that our system is inherently racist. Note that Brock Turner is a young white male, and many exonerees are often black.

However, what you seem to fail to realize is the media has instructed us to believe that rape is not as bad as we make it out to be. Yes, it has. I just wrote a paper on how the media has taught us everything we feel/believe about fat people; it would be naïve to believe that it hasn’t done the same with rape. The thing is, the media doesn’t come outright and say “rape is okay” – it simply makes you believe things about rape that aren’t true.

[NOTE: I wrote this a while back, and have submitted it as a paper to one of my gender classes before]

So I was checking out info about the male-female wage gap.

Contrary to what any anti-feminist is going to tell me, a wage gap between men and women does exist on a large scale. Currently, you’re looking at a ratio of .81, which means that approximately women earn about 19% less than men. This is generally coming out of the US Department of Labor, collected from information taken by the US Census Bureau. (1) Yes, I’m citing government studies here, among a lot of scholarly articles that I have the full PDFs of but don’t really have a way to link to it here. I’ll link the JSTOR page for it, but if you can’t read it, I’ll give you a copy of the PDF. Yes, I do my research.

I grew up white in a black world, and my childhood was rife with turmoil. I was an outcast, taunted and beat up. I was vilified because I dared to love the black boy upstairs. By the time I was 11, white people called me “nigger lover” and black people ostracized me. I belonged nowhere. […]

And the first comment I receive is from a friend going “Fucking really? Spare me.”

Now, I don’t take crap like that lying down, so my first response (done via mobile at work) was:

I love you, but you’re not female.

I have been told before that my stranger rape was my fault because I didn’t do enough to prevent it.

I have been told that I’m a slut for using birth control, by random people in line at the pharmacy who don’t know me or my situation. Pharmacists right now in this country deny women birth control based on false stereotypes, “religion” and “values.” Women get vilified for going into women’s clinics by people who have no knowledge of the situation or reason, nor do they know what women’s clinics are even for, besides abortion.

And our lawmakers are mostly old white MEN. Do I even need to remind you about the ACA panel on birth control that contained NOT ONE SINGLE WOMAN on it?

There is a huge problem with this in our country. But you’re a man, so unless you decide to really educate yourself, you’ll never experience or even see it happen.

The response from him went as such:

I have educated myself. Please don’t confuse misogyny with conservatism. There are quite a lot of variants within that mindset. Gender biases are a polarizing thing in this country, being too aggressive one way or the other won’t help the situation. Unfortunately, these old fuckers on capitol hill won’t change, but they’ll be dead soon. That’s the only thing to look forward too.

And beneath it was a whole boat-ton of really shitty comments bashing on the chick who made this for, well, pretty much making it. Except for #2 and #4, obviously. She’s smart on those two. I’m rolling my eyes so hard I can see my brain.

It was a lot of bashing the gender studies’ teacher that was proud of her for doing it, calling the OP “awful” for making it especially because it mentions feminism, it made the post all about bashing on this girl because they think she means “if you hate feminism you must be awful,” and “oh there should be one for guys” and…Apparently people get butthurt if you decide that you don’t want shitty people in your life.

I got pissed off. Why? Because I’m really fucking sick of people bashing on teenage girls that want to be feminist and are trying to discover why feminism exists and what it does. That is the entire reason they bashed on this girl. And I’m the one who’s “overreacting” for feeling that a) it was a very sexist attack and b) it doesn’t have to be about boys vs girls.

I am really fucking sick and tired of people hating on feminist girls for not liking boys all of the time. Because all you are doing is encouraging the stereotype of the man-hating feminist. I am a feminist (a liberal one mind you) and I am pretty much straight. I like boys. I date boys. I have a boy I want to marry.

But let me tell you now, boys are not all that great all of the time. And I really dislike the fact that you want to shit all over some girls that says “I want to date boys but there are some shitty ass men on this planet (I may have even had some encounters with some) so let me classify some of this so that those boys can stay the fuck away from me.” You hate on it and turn it around and be like “Then men need one so they can stay away from you”…

For one, I really truly get annoyed when people confuse biological sex and gender. Because biological sex can’t be controlled, and gender can because gender is the one that’s a social construct. Refusing medical treatment based on your biological sex because you don’t believe in gender shows a basic ignorance of what each of them actually are.

I love your definition of patriarchy and how it couples with andocentrism. What a lot of feminists don’t seem to understand is that the andocentrism is the part that hurts men. I especially liked “assumes that male norms operate throughout all social institutions and become the standard to which persons adhere.” That right there shows just how the patriarchy hurts everyone, male and female alike, because it makes men feel like they need to live up to these standards that are set too high to begin with and these are the standards that are made to hurt women. Doesn’t matter if it makes these men uncomfortable, they need to do it to live up to societal standards.

I also love how you realize that society as a whole – not just males, not just white people, not just [insert group here] – has created the problems we have today. Society is huge and complex and things didn’t just become the way they are by a huge group of people (ex: all the men) with a collective mindset enforcing them that way.

I love how you talk about where the real inequality is. Yes, under the law, women enjoy a much more equal status now than ever before. That doesn’t mean that inequality doesn’t exist. No one went after erectile dysfunction medication and whether or not the Affordable Care Act (ACA) should provide for it. But there were weeks and months of debate about whether birth control (a female only drug) should be provided for. Yes, legally we have the freedom to access an abortion. In reality, it’s nearly unaffordable without insurance and many insurance companies refuse to cover it. Also, depending on your state and how strict the laws are, there may only be a handful of abortion providers for hundreds of thousands of people. Does that sound like equality?

I also saw the inequality being pushed on us in that military thing. So very many people didn’t realize that women did not enjoy the right to fight in a combat position in war. It’s not that we never volunteered; it’s that we were not permitted to do so due to that prevailing point of view that women are too weak to do so. I’m sure there are plenty of (not outright) discriminatory practices that are in place so that women aren’t allowed to work some of the dangerous jobs men do because of that prevailing mindset.

And I enjoy how you talk about the fact that it’s ourselves that are our worst enemies. I actually do not see men doing half of the slut-shaming or judging of women that women do to themselves. None of the men I have dated (and I can count about 7 actual boyfriends) have cared about whether I wore my hair up or down, wore makeup or not, wore perfume or not, shaved or didn’t (actually the only bitch I heard about that was that I needed to maintain it because the grow-in can be scratchy.)

Women, on the other hand, are the most critical of other women. ”She dresses like a slut” “She’s so easy” “It gives men the idea we’re all like that”… when in fact, it doesn’t. We’re just so paranoid. [Which, by the way, is part and parcel of the inequality we’re fighting against and the patriarchy that does, in fact, exist.]

In particular, I think it’s these radfems who spout stuff like “all heterosexual sex is rape” that gives feminism a bad name and makes women (who I would consider feminists, even if they don’t use the term) afraid to be associated with the movement. It gives misogynistic men the evidence to point to when they say “all feminists are crazy” and it gives women such a fright that they won’t say they’re feminists for fear that they’ll end up as forever alone cat ladies because men won’t wanna be near them.